Kitty Hawk was the town on the Outer Banks where Orville and Wilber came to work on flying. They chose this area because of its strong winds, its sand (for safer and gentler landings) and its isolation – there were no spectators or reporters gawking at them and writing about their successes and their failures It took them two train rides and two boat trips to get from their home in Dayton to Kitty Hawk. All of their testing, gliding and flying was actually done south of town in Kill Devil Hills. Kill Devil Hills was a huge sand dune area – there were four high dunes, lots of flat sand and little else – no grass, no trees, just sand.
The Wright brothers understood better than anyone that manned flight would only happen if they were able to control the plane. They also had to deal with lift and thrust. On their first trip to Kitty Hawk in 1900 (they came to Kitty Hawk in the winter when their bicycle shop in Dayton was closed) they worked on the lift part of the problem. They were not as successful as they’d hoped and returned to Dayton to study more and build another test glider. Their trip in 1901 wasn’t much more successful. They were frustrated with the amount of lift they were seeing and realized that their design was based on false data, so back to Dayton they went where they built their own wind tunnel and produced their own data.
In 1902 they came to Kill Devil Hills and tested their new glider designs and added a movable tail, helping control the gliders tendency to slide sideways when trying to execute a turn. Hundreds of glides from those high dunes convinced them that they now had the lift and control issues well in hand. When they returned to Kitty Hawk in 1903, they brought with them the gasoline engine they had designed themselves as well as propellers they designed and then tested in their wind tunnel. Their first attempt at flight was on December 14, but was unsuccessful when the flyer climbed too steeply, stalled and dove into the sand. Repairs were done and they tried again on December 17. They actually flew their flyer four times that day – the first flight was 120 feet and lasted 12 seconds – the fourth flight of the day went 852 feet and lasted for 59 seconds. And from the informational brochure we got at the memorial, the definition of flying – a manned, heavier-than-air machine leaving the ground by its own power, moving forward under control without losing speed and landing on a point as high as that from which it started. Truly and awesome achievement!
Did you know that a tiny piece of wood and a tiny piece of cloth from the flyer the Wright brothers flew on December 17, 1903 went with Neil Armstrong to the moon? From the first airplane flight to the moon in just sixty-six years – pretty incredible.
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| the Wright Brothers Monument - sitting atop Kill Devil Hill, marking the site where hundreds of glider flights preceded the first powered flight |
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| from the top of Kill Devil Hill - there was no grass and no trees when the Wright brothers were here, but the two buildings are replicas of their 1903 hanger and workshop - at the left of the picture is the point where the flights on December 17, 1903 originated and the four spots where the flights ended (the first three are close together, the fourth is almost to the trees) |
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| a look down the flight paths - this is the origination point and the four marks in the distance mark the length of the four flights |
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| a replica of the glider the Wright's used in ther 1902 testing |
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| an exact replica of their 1903 flyer |
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